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Saturday, March 17, 2018

`Equally Inappropriate Words'

The list of
words drained of meaning by overuse, laziness and intentional corruption has
reached dictionary proportions. Awesome comes
to mind first. Once reserved to describe the deity, it now signifies faux-enthusiastic
agreement or endorsement: “I will pay the utility bill.” “Awesome!” The word is
unusable and dead. More regrettably lost are community and conversation. Once
humble and useful, such words now are verbal gestures without content. Users
are interested not in communicating information but in signaling that they are
the sort of people who care about what community
and conversation used to mean. This
phenomenon is not new, of course; merely accelerating. On this date, March 17, in 1944, Orwell not only diagnosed the ailment but proposed treatment:

“With no
power to put my decrees into operation, but with as much authority as most of
the exile ‘governments’ now sheltering in various parts of the world, I
pronounce sentence of death on the following words and expressions: Achilles’
heel, jackboot, hydra-headed, ride roughshod over, stab in the back,
petty-bourgeois, stinking corpse, liquidate, iron heel, blood-stained
oppressor, cynical betrayal, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, jackal, hyena,
blood-bath.”

For Orwell,
the principal culprits are the Marxists and fellow travelers, whose descendants
are still with us. Of the seventeen words, some have faded into yesterday’s clichés.
Some have shifted meaning. Some have lost their Marxist context. One seldom
hears “petty-bourgeois” anymore. “Mad dog” and “blood-bath” I might use
ironically.

Drained of
their 1940s political sense are “lackey” and “flunkey,” about which Orwell
writes:

“. . . they
and other equally inappropriate words are dug up for pamphleteering purposes.
The result is a style of writing that bears the same relation to writing real
English as doing a jigsaw puzzle bears to painting a picture. It is just a
question of fitting together a number of ready-made pieces. Just talk about
hydra-headed jack-boots riding roughshod over blood-stained hyenas, and you are
all right. For confirmation of which, see almost any pamphlet issued by the
Communist Party—or by any other political party, for that matter.”